


somewhere with you

by Shachaai



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, LLYBB Bing, M/M, Viktor is still an ice-skater, philosophical pigeons have a death-wish and an off-screen alliance against Makkachin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 16:52:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14289219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/Shachaai
Summary: About once every two weeks, Viktor’s apartment block likes to fall through a crack in the world, slipping sideways into Nowhere In Particular.It’s just typical that it has to happen the day he has an awful headache and is supposed to be picking up his dog from his boyfriend.





	somewhere with you

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the LLYBB bing #2, planned out with the extremely patient [Skowronek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skowronek/pseuds/Skowronek) and [dyeingdoll](https://dyeingdoll.tumblr.com/), whose gorgeous work for this bing you can see [here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14256285#main)  
> No pigeons were threatened in the making of this fic. The author, however, spent two days sitting in hospital on some truly uncomfortable seats with a relative, then went home and promptly whacked her head and twisted her ankle the next. Cursed bing is cursed.

Viktor has a love-hate relationship with his alarm clock. He loves it because it does his job and wakes him up when he would otherwise sleep through his obligations (though Yuuri says that Viktor shouldn’t give his heart away so easily to something that is only fulfilling its _basic design purpose,_ Viktor would like to counter that technically Viktor’s _sofa_ fulfills its ‘basic design purpose’ as well - i.e, you can, if you are masochistic enough, sit on it, though no-one particularly _likes_ sitting on the fashionably unforgiving thing because it is hard, hurts the bum and back, and gets Viktor no kisses whatsoever from either his dog or his unimpressed boyfriend when he tries to initiate cuddletime on it. Loving something for excelling at doing exactly the job it is designed for might be a low bar, but it’s a bar that likes to smack Viktor in the shins frequently).

Viktor hates his alarm clock because he is a morning person, and the only times he needs to use the clock are those days where he has gotten in from a red-eye flight, gotten home, and crashed face-down on his mattress to get perhaps two, three, hours sleep before his alarm blares itself in his ear.

The alarm clock rings, and Viktor loathes it utterly. His head is pounding and he could really do with sleeping until the afternoon - but he has to go and get his dog from his extremely busy boyfriend, showering both with much-needed kisses. An obligation, however sweet, is still an obligation, so Viktor pries open his eyes and his body up from his bed (not necessarily in that order), staggering through to his kitchen in the search for his kettle and coffee strong enough to kill a man not already half-dead.

At the window, the pigeons are talking French philosophy. Again. It’s entirely too early for Descartes - _cognito ergo sum -_ so Viktor opens the window to shoo them away. Because he is not Makkachin and Makkachin and Viktor have not been in the apartment for a week, they ignore him. One of the more uppity ones, in fact, actually goes on to begin a monologue on the extent to which Malebranche succeeded in synthesising the strands of Augustine and Descartian philosophies in his work, completely ignoring the irate background whistle of Viktor’s kettle as it boils in the kitchen.

Viktor is too tired to even glower. Promises, however, have always come to him easily (and left, forgotten, just the same). “I know three different ways to cook and eat you and still keep to my diet plan,” he tells the pigeons, in an appropriately dramatic pause in the avian soliloquy (that has now turned to the topic of immutable truths).

Philosophy in the pigeon world undergoes a rapid breakthrough in the span of three seconds, as the birds on Viktor’s windowsill come to understand that _cognito ergo sum_ is reliant upon the presence of life in the one who utters the phrase. Thus, the pigeons ought to immediately depart before Viktor has their little feathery butts plucked and used to stuff his sofa cushions.

Viktor makes and drinks his coffee in peace.

  

*****

  

Four streets away from his home, Viktor is lost. It’s a familiar clinch: about once every two weeks (perhaps it’s more; Viktor doesn’t always notice or care as long as it doesn’t impede him getting to the ice-rink or Yuuri), Viktor’s apartment block likes to fall through a crack in the world, slipping sideways into Nowhere In Particular. Or something similar. The world cracks along its jagged unseen edges and puts itself back together with all its pieces temporarily overlapping differently than before. The sky above and the spaces at the corners of Viktor’s eyes are always bland and white, and the people on the streets -

Even if directions would be a god-send, Viktor doesn’t talk to the - probable - people on the streets unless they speak to him first. When alone, he doesn’t really talk to people in public anyway even when the world outside his apartment hasn’t become Nowhere - unless they have a very cute dog -, but, like this, he can call that apathy common sense. Most things living in Nowhere - people, animals, and plants alike - have talents outside the average, and the benign ones range from the philosophical pigeons that like to haunt Viktor’s windowsills on the mornings Nowhere wraps around his home, to singing flowers, to a man selling spare shadows on a street corner, red ribbons tied to the bobbing shadows’ ankles wrapped around his wrist.

(There are many talents Viktor sees glimpses of in Nowhere that do not seem benign.)

A decade ago, Viktor had adopted Makkachin from the streets of Nowhere - a scruffy little poodle puppy who had happily followed Viktor down three meandering streets that had not been there (for Viktor) the day before. Collarless and with matted fur, she had been covered in mud and looked half-starved, but had still responded to Viktor crouching down beside her and offering her his hand to sniff with happy little huffs and wet puppy kisses to his cheeks.

Viktor had skipped the rink that day, wrapping the puppy up in his jacket and taking her back home with him to give her a bath and feed her steamed chicken breast. One trip to the vet’s later, the puppy had become _Makkachin,_ her matted fur shorn away and her first chip put in so she would never be truly lost and alone on the streets ever again.

Viktor had gone home that afternoon with half the ‘doggy luxury’ contents of a pet shop and Makkachin trotting along beside him in her new collar, her tail wagging faster than a hummingbird’s wings.

When the world was set to rights again - or its usual functioning type of wrong -, on the first full moon after Makkachin had moved into Viktor’s home and life, Viktor found something strange in his young poodle’s fur. Or perhaps, it is better to say that Viktor found something strange _about_ Makkachin’s fur, for, when he ran his fingers through it, his hand came across patches of the fur that were lighter than her usual chestnut colour, hard but malleable under his fingers, like metal.

Gold.

Viktor trimmed those patches of fur, but by the following day they had all grown back again - and spread, until Makkachin had three large sections of fur on her back and belly that were a bright yellow gold.

The puppy had not seemed out of sorts about her sudden outbreak of golden fur, but Viktor had taken her to the vet’s again anyway, who had, in turn, referred him on to an alchemy specialist.

The alchemist had managed to fix the ‘turning gold’ problem for a nominal fee (as, unlike other ailments, things turning gold tended to pay for themselves), though she had warned that, as a creature from Nowhere, Makkachin’s problem would almost definitely resurface. Which it had on the next full moon.

Ever since then, Viktor has had to schedule Makkachin annual check-ups by the solar calendar at the vet and monthly check-ups at the alchemist’s by the lunar. His precious baby girl is worth it, of course, still as prone to doggy kisses and cuddles despite being a great deal larger than she was in her puppy days and capable of sending an internationally-acclaimed athlete (i.e, _him_ ) sprawling on the floor when she hits them at high speeds.

At the beginning of the year, Makkachin’s alchemist had retired. Her replacement had been one Yuuri Katsuki, a lovely dark-haired twenty-something that Viktor had been almost immediately willing to trade everything except his dog for for Yuuri’s phone number, hungry for the curve of Yuuri’s smile, Yuuri’s gorgeous legs, the tools of his trade trickling like water through long deft fingers. It had taken Viktor weeks of suave desperation to get the number - and then _months_ of hopeless pining, a lot of alchemic purchases made from Yuuri’s shop, a great many attempts to ask the Extremely Oblivious and Unassuming Yuuri out (featuring one failed transmutation which had driven them all out of Yuuri’s shop for an afternoon waiting for the fumes to clear), and a great many _more_ reassurances made to Yuuri that, yes, Viktor _really really likes him_.

(“You are the _best_ baby girl in the whole wide world,” Viktor had whispered to Makkachin after he had _finally_ gotten a date with the cutest alchemist in Eurasia.

Makkachin, who had - also - been won over by Yuuri’s charms even before Yuuri had broken out the dog biscuits to spoil her at their first meeting, had eagerly agreed with Viktor’s pronouncement, her tail going ninety to the dozen as she let out a happy _boof!_ )

But now - now Viktor is tired, missing his dog, missing his boyfriend, and is, only four streets away from his home, lost. Nowhere wraps around him in shades of white and grey, and every store-front he passes seems to have the exact same eyeless mannequin in it wearing the exact same shapeless sack of beige. His favourite café is not where it had been yesterday, and in its place an old tree sags over the pavement, its boughs heavy with pears.

Resisting the temptation to pick any of the fruit - the last time he bothered a tree in Nowhere, it hit him -, Viktor reaches into his pockets for his phone to let Yuuri know he’s going to be late. Temporal difficulties. And then has to pat down his pockets, every one of them, because his phone is not where it should be.

In fact, his phone is not on his person at all. Had Viktor even unpacked it from his hand-luggage after getting in from his red-eye the night before…?

Viktor does not curse - himself, or the universe - out-loud, because Yuuri says words have power and doing such things invites trouble. Viktor is inclined to agree with him, because if a sweet poodle can follow him home in Nowhere, darker and more troublesome things can too - and Viktor much prefers the kind of trouble that is a naked Yuuri soft and smiling, drowsy-eyed, between Viktor’s bedsheets, his palm sliding promisingly down Viktor’s equally naked chest.

(The last time:

“Have I told you how much I love you this morning?” Viktor had asked, letting his own fingertips trace wondrously down the sleek muscle of Yuuri’s arm, Yuuri tucked up close with him in bed, their limbs tangled and lovely.

Yuuri’s hair had been like glossy ink over Viktor’s pillows and in the sleepy forge, workshop, of Viktor’s bed, the morning sunlight had been performing its own transmutation on the alchemist’s skin: Yuuri, haloed by gentle light, breathing gold that brushed over Viktor’s own lips. The warmth of it melting like honey over Viktor’s heart and making him smile, helplessly, watching its reflection break like the dawn over Yuuri’s face.

“A thousand times, I think,” Yuuri had murmured back at him, sliding closer across the mattress to nudge their mouths closer, tip his head back just enough so when he speaks his lips move over Viktor’s in almost kiss. “With your eyes alone.”

Viktor had pouted for the show of it, bumping Yuuri’s nose with his own and letting his stomach thrill at Yuuri’s responding laugh. “ _Yuuuuri._ Just my eyes?”

Yuuri is a good alchemist; he knows gold. It breathes in him, every inch of him, in his eyes and his heart and his smile. “Your mouth was occupied.”)

  

*****

  

Nowhere is - Nowhere is so much of everywhere at once, it becomes nowhere at all. For ice-skating competitions and events, Viktor has travelled the world, but there is very little in the world that lingers in his memory. If you see enough airports, enough cities, they all look the same, and Nowhere, slipped sideways through the world, is that principle to the extreme.

The base is vaguely Russian. Viktor lives in St. Petersburg and the city is his frame of reference for almost everywhere else; in Nowhere, his feet trace the same patterns down streets he has known all his life even when his mind is telling him those streets don’t currently exist. Seagulls cry overhead. Russian pre-Soviet architecture wars with an avenue of palm trees wrapped in fairy lights, buildings plucked from imperial fairytales dream beside low-roofed stilted shacks that sprawl out indolently from familiar riverbanks into the water. In the distance, Viktor can see snow-capped mountains that definitely don’t belong in St. Petersburg, a red radio tower, glass-covered office buildings he doesn’t believe he has ever seen before but vaguely recognises all the same.

In the middle of it all, Viktor stops walking, because it’s only a forty-five minute to Yuuri’s at Viktor’s slowest walking pace - and Viktor has been walking for almost an hour and still hasn’t gotten anywhere he can recognise as being close by. His feet are beginning to protest his aimlessness almost as much as his headache. Sleep-deprivation holds Viktor more closely than a lover can manage (despite Yuuri’s many best efforts), worming bland nothing tendrils into his brain until it feels like his skull will crack open with the ache of it, spill out nothing into Nowhere, the same not-colour of the _nothing_ that is everywhere Viktor tries to look when he is nowhere at all, forever at the corner of his eyes.

He should go home, if he can find his way back there, and call Yuuri. Let Yuuri know that Viktor will be unable to pick up Makkachin that day.

But if Viktor does that, he won’t see Makkachin _or_ Yuuri all day and. And it’s been a very long week without them, nowhere welling up inside Viktor’s ribcage long before it had coiled itself around his home. Again. And tomorrow will start as terribly as today, and Nowhere will likely be here again, because _somewhere_ only definitely happens where the good things in Viktor’s life are: with the ice, with his dog, and with Yuuri.

Viktor is very tired. Viktor is very tired, so Viktor stands in the middle of the pavement, closes his eyes, and just. Tries to breathe.

Follows his feelings home.

The air smells like the river, like dark tea and black bread baking in the oven - but also now like pears, like exotic hothouse flowers and cherry blossoms, like pine woods and ocean brine. The stone of the pavements smells like dust and tar and petrichor, and the air crisps with ozone that makes the hair prickle on the nape of Viktor’s neck: right where Yuuri kisses him when they fall asleep tangled together at night.

Yuuri does not prickle like ozone. Yuuri’s shop smells like Yuuri and his arts: a base made up of the fumes of his cauldrons’ fires, the blood-tang of iron and the sun-warmed skin smell of gold. In-between floats the scent of herbs, of ink and chalk and ashy charcoal, the damp dog smell that is Makkachin covering Yuuri in slobbery kisses every opportunity she gets, and the pork-egg-seasoned rice smell of Yuuri’s favourite dish - katsudon - that Viktor usually licks from Yuuri’s mouth himself, scraping his nails up the slope of Yuuri’s spine.

The top notes are a sweet smokiness, like freshly-brewed tea freshly-stirred with good jam, and the scents of soap and jasmine laundry detergent. The bald fruity scent of Yuuri’s dollar-store shampoo that lingers on Viktor’s pillows for two days after Yuuri has left the bed.

Yuuri smells like home, and, in the restful darkness behind his eyes where the nothing - for once - doesn’t reach, Viktor’s head and throat and heart all ache with it.

Or perhaps he aches because the world is resettling itself with Viktor still out of sorts inside it, because his eyes blink open again a few moments later to a familiar _boof!_

Makkachin hits Viktor’s calves at a dead run, and Viktor wipes out on the pavement.

Too late, a voice cries: “Makkachin, _no!”_

Viktor is laughing at the wet dog tongue enthusiastically swiping itself over his face even before he opens his eyes again, his hands burying themselves in familiar chestnut fur - free of gold in the middle of the lunar month - as his poodle attempts to cover him entirely in affectionate slobber. Makkachin is heavy and happy and smells like Yuuri’s alchemy and detergent, as she has undoubtedly been padding around Yuuri’s workplace and sleeping on Yuuri’s bed and/or clothes whilst Yuuri was looking after her.

Above Viktor is dog-breath and Makkachin’s wet nose, and above that the sky is blue with the occasional fat fluffy cloud. To his side, footsteps pound on the pavement, and Viktor’s view suddenly becomes infinitely lovelier as Yuuri Katsuki leans over him, breathless from his abrupt sprint.

Even Yuuri’s troubled expression is so dear. “Vitya, I’m so sorry! She spotted you before I did and then she was off before I could do anything about it.”

Viktor just smiles up at him hopelessly, before putting his palm between his mouth and Makkachin’s tongue so he can coo at the poodle. “Makka, what have I told you about giving our Yuuri a heart attack before he’s thirty?”

Ever the inattentive student, Makkachin _boofs_ in Viktor’s ear and licks his arm in one long wet swipe from mid-forearm to fingertips.

“Why is _thirty_ the cut-off point?” Yuuri asks from above her, sounding vaguely reproachful even as he starts pulling Makkachin off of Viktor by her collar.

Viktor just laughs, propping himself up on his elbows and cheerfully ignoring the looks he, his boyfriend and his dog are getting for the scene they’re making in the middle of a semi-busy St. Petersburg street. Buildings appear to be back where they ought to be. People chatter; seagulls cry out in the sky. Streets over, cars beep. No more blandness.

“Yuuri, my Yuuri, if we’re going to co-parent this poodle effectively, we really need to set her small, _achievable_ targets.”

Yuuri huffs at him for that, but makes a pleased little sound when Viktor clambers back up to his feet and wraps his arms around him, burying his nose in Yuuri’s neck.

Viktor has missed this: Yuuri’s warmth, Yuuri’s smell, warmth filling up the little hollow under his breastbone that had been growing for a week. “I was lost without you.”

“You were _late_ without me,” Yuuri grumbles, but his fingers are digging themselves fondly into the clothes on Viktor’s back. Viktor could sleep here, standing upright with his face buried in Yuuri’s shoulder, his headache easing in Yuuri’s presence. “You were supposed to be at my shop almost half an hour ago.”

Viktor kisses his throat, humming at the happy little leap in Yuuri’s pulse under his lips. “I’m sorry. Nowhere was being difficult, and I forgot to unpack my phone.”

“It’s alright.” Yuuri shuffles them to the side of the pavement - still holding each other like some kind of siamese octopus with a doggy best friend because Viktor refuses to let his two great loves go - so two scowling little old ladies can pass by them. “I took a break to bring her to you, since it seemed you weren’t coming to us on time.”

Viktor grins, and lifts his head to see the sunlight bring out the flecks of gold in Yuuri’s eyes. “A break? At the beginning of the day? I go away for a week and suddenly you’re being kind to yourself. Perhaps I should have stayed away a little longer, to give you the time to reform your night-owl ways as well.”

Yuuri pouts - “Vitya…” - and Viktor kisses it, his smile widening at the exasperated note in Yuuri’s voice. “You’re covered in dog-drool.”

How rude. “You should be flattered that I shared Makkachin’s precious kisses with you,” says Viktor, and reaches down to pat the poodle in question when Makkachin, hearing her name, bumps her head happily against his thigh. Such a good girl.

“Flattered. Right.” Yuuri is doing his very best to seem cross, but Viktor can taste the twitch of his smile when he kisses Yuuri again, close-mouthed and warm. “I feel like you’re learning nothing from my scolding.”

“You’re scolding?” Viktor would be wounded, but he can still feel laughter bubbling in his throat, sweet and bright and everything to do with Yuuri in his arms and the poodle tail thumping off his ankle like a metronome. “How mean, my Yuuri. I had to threaten pigeons to fight my way to your side.”

“Not _pigeons,_ ” says Yuuri, and Makkachin barks. Pigeons: her mortal enemies.

 _“Pigeons,_ ” Viktor repeats. “When was the last time somebody fought pigeons for you?”

“Ten minutes ago,” says Yuuri, and laughs when Viktor’s face falls. “Makkachin chased away a whole flock on our way here.”

Viktor looks down at his poodle reproachfully. “You can’t even leave me _one_ unique achievement?”

Makkachin barks at him again in response, her eyes big and googly with affection, the velocity of her tail increasing substantially.

“Traitor,” Viktor tells her without any ire, smiling again when Yuuri laughs at him, when Yuuri kisses his cheek and his fingers slide down Viktor’s wrist to hold his hand.

(In the middle of a St. Petersburg street, four streets from his apartment - Viktor is home.)


End file.
